A Brief History of What People Mean

First there were dinosaurs, obviously Then Greeks and then the Romans, naturally Then knights and plague and witches, more or less Then mills and soot and children in distress Then mud and wire and poppies in the rain Then Hitler, blitz, and ration books again Then came the Sixties, colour, sex, and speed Then Thatcher, greed, then Blair, and there’s your feed A lot went on between, I’m sure it did But nothing with a poster quite that big The years were full, the decades must have teemed But not with things that anybody means A brief history of what people mean Not what occurred, but what can still be seen A dozen hats, a slogan, and a scene We keep the costume, lose the century A brief history of what people mean Small enough to carry into speech Trimmed for effect and cleaned for easy reach A handy past in packets neat and cheap The Romans mean decline, or roads, or law The Nazis mean the person you just saw The trenches mean futility and class Dickensian means someone thin with ash The Seventies mean bins or flares or strikes The Eighties mean ambition on a bike The Nineties mean that spin became an art And history means “this feels like the bad part” It saves a lot of time, and time is tight Why read a century to win a fight? Take one remembered image, make it lean And pin it to the argument at hand A brief history of what people mean Not what occurred, but what can still be seen A dozen props arranged in moral themes Every age reduced to one example A brief history of what people mean A schoolroom fact, a telly scene, a meme A flare, a boot, a trench, a guillotine Enough to let the present sound profound Because there’s far too much of it, you see Too many kings and Acts and treaties Too many lives that failed to make the set Too many years without a silhouette So we keep Rome and blitz and loads of money A miner’s lamp, a punk, a dead-eyed yuppie The rest can sit in storage with the dust If no one quotes it, was it really us? Now every quarrel comes pre-dressed in time With second-hand enormity attached A housing bill in jackboots and in braid A tax proposal storming through the Somme A border row in blackshirts and in fog A welfare cut in workhouse sepia A student march in Paris, maybe Prague Depending which old postcard fits the slot And yes, it’s crude, but everyone agrees The past is much too large for memory So shave it down to things with names and sleeves And let analogy perform the thought A brief history of what people mean Not what was lived, but what can be convened A usable archive dressed for the screen A thousand years reduced to handy feelings A brief history of what people mean Dinosaurs to Blair in under four minutes We keep the costume, lose the century Then ask why every argument looks staged So if you need an empire, use the Romans If you need decline, the same will do If you need a tyrant, there is Hitler If you need some hope, the Sixties might come through And if whole nations lived and died between them Well, yes, of course they did, I don’t deny it It’s just that history has got to travel light And these are the bits that fit